Suggestion: `--look=` switch

[jquorning]

I suggest refactoring handling of colors and --no-color into a new command line switch:

--look=<theme> where theme:

• dark As is default now
• light For light background
• none Same as --no-color
• auto Stretch goal

[mosteo]

Thanks for the suggestion. More generally, there are some defaults that are now hardcoded that we may want to make overridable (possibly using our config mechanism) and this could be a good fit.

[jquorning]

As a start is suggest a HTML TTY driver package:

• [ ] Create directory src/general
• [ ] Create ALR_Text_IO TTY driver accepting HTML \<b> \<i> \<em> \<br>, perhaps \<a>
• [ ] Adapt alr text output strings
• [ ] Feed driver back to community

If that sounds like a plan you may assign me the issue.

[mosteo]

I agree on the spirit of the idea, but I don't think we need to go with HTML. We basically have a series of predefined styles (crate name, version, code, url, emphasized, etc.) that we are already using mostly consistently. We would need a way to redefine these styles.

I think if we were to adopt an extra formatting library, we would end duplicating the boiler plate. We now have, for example:

Put_line ("Crate " & TTY.Name (Crate_Name) & " not found")

and going to tags we'd have

Put_line (TTY.Format ("Crate <name>" & Crate_Name & "</name> not found")

Although if at some point we wanted to go multilingual, having a way to completely excise strings from code would be necessary, and in that case I can see it working like that.

[Fabien-Chouteau]

Indeed the best solution right now is to introduce those themes in https://github.com/alire-project/alire/blob/master/src/alire/alire-utils-tty.ads

and have a configuration value to change the default.